Orthographic and Morphemic Effects in the Written Syllable Counting Task

Fabienne Chetail (1) , Pauline Quemart (2, 3)

1 Laboratoire Cognition, Langage, Développement
2 MSHS de Poitiers - Maison des sciences de l'homme et de la société de Poitiers
3 CeRCA [Poitiers] - Centre de recherches sur la cognition et l'apprentissage [UMR 7295]

According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants and vowels (i.e., CV pattern) constrains the orthographic structure of words. Here, we examined to what extent the morphological structure of words modifies the influence of the CV pattern in a syllable counting task. Participants were presented with written words matched for the number of syllables and comprising either one vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., création) or the same number of vowel clusters (control words, e.g., crépiter). Participants were slower and less accurate for hiatus than control stimuli, be it words (Experiments 1, 3) or pseudowords (Experiment 2). More importantly, this hiatus effect was present even when the stimuli had a morphemic boundary falling within the hiatus (e.g., ré-agir). The results suggest that the CV pattern of items more strongly influences performance in the syllable counting task than the morphological structure.

Mots clés: CV pattern; morphemes; prefix; hiatus; written word processing

Domaines: Psychologie

Fabienne Chetail, Pauline Quemart. Orthographic and Morphemic Effects in the Written Syllable Counting Task. Experimental Psychology, 2014, 61 (6), pp.457-469. ⟨10.1027/1618-3169/a000267⟩. ⟨hal-02078221⟩